In the recycling of waste secondary materials it is very useful to be able to separate mixtures of materials into usable fractions. Such separations are sometimes performed by fully automated systems which use automated sensors for materials identification with subsequent automated extraction of selected materials from mixtures such as disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,260,576 and 5,555,984. In many instances automated materials handling and sorting systems are combined with manual handsorting in a semi-automated process such as that disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,411,147. In many other systems, particularly at smaller recycling facilities, most of the sorting is done by manual handsorting.
In a fully automated sorting system identification of materials to be extracted from a conveyed stream is performed by automated sensors which are specific to identification of certain materials. Advantages to these systems are often high speed and the lack of need for manual labor. A disadvantage to these systems is that automated sensors are generally limited in their ability to identify a wide range of materials and therefore have limited applicability to only selected sorting tasks. On the other hand, in manual handsorting the human visual sensory system is used to make identifications and advantageously is capable of efficiently identifying a wide range of various materials to be sorted. However, also in manual handsorting, human hands are used to make the sorting extractions from the waste stream with disadvantages of relatively low capacity compared to the speed of identifications that a human can perform, and secondly, handsorting requires that humans come into contact with a waste stream which in general is unsanitary and often contains hazardous objects such as broken glass and other objects which can easily puncture or cut.
Present sorting technologies for waste materials generally require the presence of an operator on the sorting floor or, in the case of manual handsorting, at the sorting line manually extracting recyclable materials from the waste stream. This generally requires that the equipment operator or manual handsorters be able-bodied. Therefore this type of work has generally not been available to the physically handicapped since the physical demands of the work would be beyond their capabilities or would place them in a dangerous environment because of their physical condition. This situation has lessened job opportunities for the physically handicapped.
Robotic systems have been applied in industry for a number of years typically to reduce human labor, reduce human presence in hazardous or potentially hazardous situations, and to replace humans in tedious repetitive tasks. In U.S. Pat. No. 5,299,693 a robotic system is described for extracting recyclable materials from a waste stream where the recyclable materials physically have a tag coupled to them which provides a non-visual identifying signal which can be received by a sensor for identification and with a robotic arm subsequently guided into the waste stream to retrieve the tagged item. However, the requirement for physical attachment of a signal generating tag to the items to be sorted limits the usefulness of the process and would require a massive change in practices by the packaging industry to provide such signal markers on packaging materials typically found in the waste stream. U.S. Pat. No. 5,411,147 discloses using robotic arms to extract materials from a waste stream although details of the robotic systems and interactive functions with humans are not provided. U.S. Pat. No. 4,942,538 discloses a teleoperated robotic tracker which is guided by a human operator using a joystick type hand controller with video feedback of robotic arm motion to the operator from a camera mounted on the robotic arm. The use of such a system for recyclables sorting would be awkward and slow since the human operator would need to provide continual guidance to the robotic arm throughout the whole sorting process. There are numerous other robotic systems with interactive human operation disclosed in the prior art. However, nowhere in the prior art have the inventors found descriptions of robotic systems for sorting materials where the identification of selected materials to be extracted from a waste stream or other conveyed stream of materials is provided by a human operator utilizing a computerized pointing device such as a touch screen for electronically registering the spatial coordinates of the selected materials with subsequent fully computerized control of a mechanical or other robotic system to acquire and extract the selected materials from the conveyed stream.